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The American Middle Class and the Politics of Education Margaret Weir University of California, Berkeley

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The American Middle Class and the Politics of Education Margaret Weir University of California, Berkeley The American Middle Class and The Politics of Education Margaret Weir University of California, Berkeley forthcoming in Postwar Social Contracts under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century edited by Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari In the fall of 1994, just weeks after the first Republican Congress in a generation was elected, President Clinton floated the idea of a “Middle Class Bill of Rights.” The initiative proposed tax deductions for college tuition payments and other post-secondary educational training. For Clinton, who had failed in his high-risk bid to enact comprehensive health reform, the emphasis on education and the middle class signaled a retreat to safer ground. His move reflected what every American politician knew: when the battleground is the middle class, education represents the higher ground. Long distinguished by its tradition of universal public schooling, the United States renewed its commitment to education after World War II with massive investments. Newly-formed suburbs built thousands of new schools to accommodate the baby boom generation and states transformed a desultory array of state colleges and institutes into coherent and well-funded systems of higher education. The federal government pitched in as well. Starting with educational grants for veterans provided by the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, Washington provided financial assistance that both supported and prodded further state and local action. This burst of investment in education offered occupational mobility to millions of Americans and supplied credentials for a range of occupations seeking to upgrade their professional status. In the process, education helped to blur the lines that once separated the working classes from the middle classes. In contrast to European nations where postwar social welfare entitlements and institutions fostered security and solidarity across class lines, the vast expansion of education in the United States promised opportunities that would make the very notion of class obsolete and the need for social welfare minimal.i The high levels of support for education that routinely registered in opinion polls indicated broad public approval for this distinctively American approach to smoothing class divisions. The middle class and education thus appeared intertwined in a virtuous political relationship: expanded education created a broad middle class and that middle class in turn provided political support for education. However, this simple equation, a staple of postwar American politics, falls short in two respects. First, it fails to recognize the inherent tensions in the relationship between education and the broad middle class. Expanded education, even as it opens new avenues for upward mobility, sorts the population into educated and less-educated categories. The significance of these categories for the middle class is not fixed: it can only be understood in a specific historical context. Second, the portrayal of the middle class as the backbone of support for education ignores the ambiguity of the middle class both as an object of political contention and as an actor. The terms on which the middle class participates in politics--the issues it engages, the identities it assumes, indeed, the very boundaries of the group itself--are all profoundly shaped by the institutional context in which politicians confront it and in which its own interests are formed. This chapter examines the relationship between the American middle class and education from the immediate postwar era to the present. In the decades after World War II, historically contingent economic and political developments fostered a mutually-reinforcing relationship between education and the broad middle class. Distinctive features of the postwar economy dampened the sorting functions of education, permitting its mobility and class-blurring characteristics to predominate. At the same time, developments in state and local political arenas-- the main funders and providers of education--were unusually favorable to linking broad middle class interests with educational expansion. These favorable political and economic conditions masked education’s role in defining the external boundaries and internal divisions of the postwar middle class. When the economic and political ground i On the American propensity to treat education as a central component of welfare, see Arnold J. Heidenheimer, “Education and Social Security Entitlements in Europe and America,” The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America ed. Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987), 269- 304; and Morris Janowitz, Social Control of the Welfare State (New York: Elsevier, 1976). 1 shifted in the 1970s and 1980s, the divisive effects of education on a broad middle class appeared in sharp relief. The economy now amplified the sorting functions of education and developments in state and local political institutions intensified the conflicts over education. Since 1980, presidential contenders across the political spectrum have showcased their strong support for education but their consensual rhetoric belies the sharp divisions over the financing and organization of education. Even as education became more critical for achieving middle class status, the political consensus that once supported the postwar expansion broke down. I. Public Education and the Golden Age of the White Middle Class Education, the Economy, and the Postwar Middle Class One of the staples of postwar accounts of the middle class is the central role of education in creating it. On the fiftieth anniversary of the GI Bill in 1994, magazines featured interviews with working class veterans who never would have gone to college and entered white collar occupations without the assistance of the GI Bill. The GI Bill opened the possibility of middle class lives to millions of soldiers with working class backgrounds. An estimated 2.2 of 14 million eligible veterans took advantage of the tuition, stipends, and other assistance that the act provided.ii The GI Bill was only the beginning of the federal government’s effort to expand access to higher education in postwar America. In 1948, the President’s Commission on Higher Education (the Truman Commission) declared that higher education should not be “confined to an intellectual elite, much less a small elite drawn largely from families in the higher income brackets.”iii Two decades later, ongoing federal assistance and massive state support had indeed opened the doors of higher education far wider than they had been. The increase in total attendance was dramatic: in 1947, a total of 2.3 million students (14 percent of all 18-24 year olds) was enrolled in higher educational institutions; by 1980, the figure was 12.1 million (40 percent of all 18-24 year olds).iv Likewise the percent of high school graduates enrolling in college grew from 45 percent in 1960, to 67 percent by 1997.v The expansion of higher education helped to blur class lines in several ways. By promoting occupational mobility, higher education made the life chances of children from different backgrounds more similar. Access to higher education meant that fewer children followed in their parents’ occupational footsteps.vi As one study of American occupational mobility concluded, “a college degree cancels the effect of [social] origins on [occupational] destinations...”vii This was because of the particular characteristics of the public education system in the United States. The structure of primary and secondary education facilitated access to higher education because it did not slot American students irrevocably into future educational and vocational tracks, as was common in European countries. The relatively open structure of education created second and even third chances, contributing to the American sense of openness and opportunity. The expansion of higher education also helped to blur the lines of the occupational prestige hierarchy. Many occupations instituted new credentials that required attendance in institutions ii Edward Kiester, Jr., “The G.I. Bill May Be the Best Deal Ever Made by Uncle Sam,” Smithsonian 25 (November 1994): 128-37. iii Cited in Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (New York; Oxford University Press, 1989), 69. iv Enrollment data from National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Educational Statistics, 1998 (Washington D.C: 1999), Table 172, p.196; Enrollment data includes full-time and part-time enrollment. Cohort data from U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999. (Washington: GPO), p. 15, table no. 14; U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1985 (Washington: GPO), p. 26, no. 27; U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: GPO, 1975), 10, series A 29-42. The higher education cohort is based on the population between 18 and 24. v National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Educational Statistics, 1998, table 183, p.208. vi Michael Hout, “More Universalism, Less Structural Mobility: The American Occupational Structure in the 1980s,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (May 1988): 1358-1400. vii Ibid, 1391 2 of higher education. As Heidenheimer notes, although the German and American occupational prestige hierarchies were similar, in the United States occupations used
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